You cannot remove the last index replica of an index partition using this procedure. If you have to remove all index replicas from the search topology, you must remove and re-create the Search service application and create a completely new search topology that has the reduced number of index partitions.

For each 10 million items in the search index, you have to add a new index partition. When you add a new index partition, the search index has to be re-partitioned. Depending on the size of the search index, this re-partitioning can take several hours to complete.

You add an index replica to the search topology to achieve fault tolerance for an existing index partition. You place the index replicas on separate failure domains on separate servers. When you add an index replica, you add a new index component to the search topology and associate it with the index partition that you want to make a replica of.

Thursday, 3 August 2017

When you first create the Search Service Application, the search topology by default has all search components assigned to the server which is running the Central Administration. In multi servers farm scenario you need to change this topology using PowerShell.

Search architecture that you choose depends on how much content has to be searchable:

You can refer the below diagram to have better understanding for the topology that we are about to configure for 0-20 million items:

In this environment, we have five servers: two Front-Ends, two Application servers and one Index server.

This database holds information such as the last crawl time, the last crawl ID and the type of update during the last crawl.

Manages crawl operations.

Each crawl database can have one or more crawl components associated with it.

Content processing component:

This component receives the information (crawled items) from the crawl component and then processes and sends it to the indexing component. It also interacts with the analytics processing component and is responsible for mapping crawled properties to the managed properties.

The content processing component writes information about links and URLs to the link database.

Indexing Component:

This component receives the processed items from the content processing component and writes those items to the search index. Each Index files are stored on a disk in the server that hosts the index component.

It also receives the queries from Query processing component and sends back the results.

Index partition:

Dividing the search index into separate portions, called index partition.

Each index partition holds one or more index replicas(mirror/copy) that contain the same information.

Index partition vs index replicas:

An index replica is a copy of the index. This is commonly used for availability. For example, create a replica of the index on more than one server so that your queries can be served by more than one server.

A partition is a chunk of the index. Create a new partition for scale, the recommendation is 10M items. So if you are indexing a lot of content you may create multiple partitions.

Query Processing Component:

This component handles incoming query requests and sends them to the indexing component for results. It also takes care of query optimization.

When the query processing component receives a query from the search front-end, it performs linguistic processing first (like word breaking and stemming), then analyzes and further processes the query to optimize precision, recall and relevance. In the end, the processed query will be submitted to the index component.

The index component returns a result set based on the processed query back to the query processing component.

This component uses information from these analyses to improve search relevance, create search reports, and generate recommendations and deep links.

The results from the analyses are added to the items in the search index. In addition, results from usage analytics are stored in the analytics reporting database.

Search analytics VS usage analytics

Search analytics is about extracting information such as -- links, the number of times an item is clicked, anchor text, data related to people, and metadata – from the link database. This information is important to relevance.

Usage analytics is about analyzing usage log information received from the front-end via the event store. Usage analytics generates usage and statistics reports.

About the link database

The link database stores information extracted by the content processing component. In addition, it stores information about search clicks; the number of times people click on a search result from the search result page. This information is stored unprocessed, to be analyzed by the analytics processing component.

About the Analytics reporting database

The analytics reporting database stores the results of usage analytics. In addition, the analytics reporting database also stores statistics information from the analyses. SharePoint uses this information to create Excel reports that show different statistics.

About the event store:

The event store holds usage events that are captured on the front-end, such as the number of times an item is viewed.

These usage events are stored as log files on the application server that hosts the analytics processing component.

Search administration Component:

The search administration component is responsible for running a number of system processes that are essential to search.

This component manages administrative processes as well as changes to the search topology, such as adding or removing search components and servers.

Search administration database

Stores search configuration data, such as the topology, crawl rules, query rules, and the mappings between crawled and managed properties. Only one search administration database per Search service application.

Friday, 19 August 2016

Windows Server 2012 R2 includes the .NET Framework 4.5.1 as an OS component, and it is installed by default. It also includes the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as an OS component that is not installed by default.

If you run Setup(Microsoft SQL Server 2014 R2) and you do not have .NET 3.5 SP1, SQL Server Setup requires you to download and install .NET 3.5 SP1 before you continue with the SQL Server installation.

If you are trying to install .NET Frame 3.5 from the Server Manager GUI, you will see the below alert when installing the feature.

"Do you want to specify an alternate source path? One or more installation selections are missing source files on the destinatino server.…”

If your computer does not have access to windows update, then specify an alternate source path by clicking on "Specify an alternate source path" and enter the path like "C:\sources\sxs"

After you have specified the alternate source, close the warning (by clicking the x), then click Install.

Thursday, 18 August 2016

The following information provides a summary of the new features in SharePoint Server 2016 release.

MinRoles:

In 2013, server type(application server/search server/distributed cahce server) will be determined by what services you ran in your server.

In 2016, new feaure "MinRoles" get added. MinRoles will apply a set of services to a server based on the role you select it during installation.

Zero Downtime Patching:

The biggest improvement in patching for SharePoint 2016 is In-place, online, installation of patches. You can install the patches in the middle of the day without affecting users accessing the farm at all.

Microsoft removed the downtime which is required to update the SharePoint servers.

In the past with SharePoint, for general updates you got about 37 individual files to process for each patch, plus 10 for each language pack installed. In SharePoint 2016, you get 2 files to process, plus 1 file per language pack.

Compliance features:

New compliance features for SharePoint Server 2016 include the document deletion and in-place hold policies.

The document deletion policy allows you to delete documents in users' OneDrive for Business sites after specific periods of time.

Integrated Project Server:

Max File Size for Uploads:

The default maximum file size in SharePoint 2013 is 250 MB, which can be increased up to 2GB. SharePoint 2016 mas file upload size is 10GB.

Note: End users will likely get a time out while uploading large files.

File Name Support for Special Characters:

SharePoint has blocked file names that included the &, ~, {, and } characters, file names that contained a GUID, file names with leading dots, and file names longer than 128 characters were blocked in previous versions. SharePoint 2016 will allow these to be used and these restrictions are

removed in SharePoint Server 2016.

Content Database Size:

In SharePoint 2013 maximum content database size is 200GB. Microsoft posted that maximum content database size is expected to be 1TB. And each content database will be able to hold approximately 100,000 site collections.

Site Collections Per Content Database:

The recommended amount of site collections for SharePoint 2013 is 2,000 with a maximum of 5,000 collections. In SharePoint 2016 you will be able to maintain 100,000 site collections per content database.

Fast Site Collection/Site Creation:

In SharePoint 2013 site creatino takes around 40seconds. Using a template, in SharePiont 2016 users are able to create the site collection very quickly(1second). This will require a configuration with powershell.

SPSiteMaster Windows PowerShell cmdlets help to create sites and site collections quickly.

Override 5,000 View Threshold:

SharePoint has a List View Threshold (LVT) of 5,000 items. Many end users don't know that they had to index their columns to manage the threshold.

In SharePoint 2010 or 2013 indexing the columns is available but end user had to manually index their columns to break the view throshold.

In SharePoint 2016 Microsoft has automated the creation of indexed columns.

Hybrid App Launcher:

Hybrid app launcher helps users to have a more seamless experience when navigating between SharePoint Server and Office 365.

The extensible hybrid app launcher is designed to help you get to your Office 365 apps and services from SharePoint Server. Once you enable this feature, you’ll see the Office 365 Delve and Video apps, along with your custom Office 365 tiles, appear in your SharePoint Server app launcher.

In SharePoint Server 2016, this feature is enabled as part of Hybrid Sites Features.

SharePoint Search Service Application:

With SharePoint 2013, 100 million indexed items per search service application and 10 million per index partition. SharePoint 2016 search supports indexing up to 500 million items per Search Service application.

Open Document Format (ODF):

SharePoint 2016 added new support for Open Document Format (ODF) files to use in documen library templates. It enables users to create new files in a document library and save as ODF files so that users can edit the new file with a program of their choise.

Durable Links:

Durable Link is not the same as Document ID. A Durable Link is a URL of Hyperlink to a Document stored in SharePoint 2016 Document Library.

Durable Links proivde a resource ID to each document. This resource ID will be stored in the content database.

If Durable Links work in you Farm, you will see that links to Documents look like this:

When the user opens the document using Durable Links, SharePoint 2016 looks up the file by the Resource ID and opens it in Office Online Server Preview. If you move or rename this document, the link you see here will continue to work and redirect you to the same document.

The sensitive data is exposed through an eDiscovery site(You have to choose eDiscovery template to create the site in Central Admin). And then use DLP Queries from the eDiscovery site collection to discover sensitive content.

SMTP Connection Encryption:

SharePoint 2016 brings a lot of improvement in the field of out-going & Incoming emails. We can send emails using encryption and we can configure the SMTP to non-default ports (default Port is 25).

Sites page pinning:

This is a new feature with SharePoint 2016 which helps users see and follow sites. Users can pin sites that are seen on the sites page. A pinned site shows at the top of the list of followed sites.

SharePoint 2016 is taking a very different approach on roles and services. In SharePoint 2013, whether your server was a "search server" or a "distributed cache server" was all determined by what services you ran on it.

In 2016, that get a new wrinkle added to it through the use of MinRoles. MinRoles apply a set of services to a server based on the role you assign it during installation.

SharePoint automatically configures the services on each server based on the server's role. Any services running on those servers that are not in that predefined role, or stopped services that should be running, will cause health monitors to report that the server is out of compliance.

Note: You cannot choose to have the servers be multiple roles. If you want a server to perform multiple role functions, you’ll want to select "Custom" during the installation, which will let you pick and choose the services on the server in the same way as you do in SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint Server 2016 has six Server roles to choose in server installations:

Front-end: Service Application, services,and components that serve user requests. These servers are optimized for fast performance.

Application: Service Application, services,and components that serve back-end requests. Like search crawl, timerjobs. These servers are optimized for high throughput.

Distributed Cache: Service Application, services,and components that are required for a distributed cache. Optionally, you configure these server to load balance farm traffic.

Search: Service Application, services,and components that are required for search.

Custom: Custom service applications, services, and components that are outside of MinRole topology. The farm administrator has full control over which service instances can run on servers.

Single server farm:

Service applications, services, and components required for a single-machine farm. A Single-Server Farm is meant for development, testing, and very limited production use. A SharePoint farm with the Single-Server Farm role cannot have more than one SharePoint server in the farm.

Note:

The Standalone Install mode is no longer available in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview. The Single-Server Farm role replaces the Standalone Install mode available in previous SharePoint Server releases. With 2016 you don't get SQL Express included in the installation. The SharePoint administrator must separately install and prepare Microsoft SQL Server for SharePoint.